The zebrafish is a model organism for biological studies on development and gene function. Our work aims at automating the detection of the cartilage skeleton and measuring several distances and angles to ... [more ▼]

The zebrafish is a model organism for biological studies on development and gene function. Our work aims at automating the detection of the cartilage skeleton and measuring several distances and angles to quantify its development following different experimental conditions. [less ▲]

in Proceedings of the 6th IAPR International Conference on Pattern Recognition in Bioinformatics (2011)

In many biological studies, scientists assess effects of experimental conditions by visual inspection of microscopy images. They are able to observe whether a protein is expressed or not, if cells are ... [more ▼]

In many biological studies, scientists assess effects of experimental conditions by visual inspection of microscopy images. They are able to observe whether a protein is expressed or not, if cells are going through normal cell cycles, how organisms evolve in different experimental conditions, etc. But, with the large number of images acquired in high-throughput experiments, this manual inspection becomes lengthy, tedious and error-prone. In this paper, we propose to automatically detect specific interest points in microscopy images using machine learning methods with the aim of performing automatic morphometric measurements in the context of Zebrafish studies. We systematically evaluate variants of ensembles of classification and regression trees on four datasets corresponding to different imaging modalities and experimental conditions. Our results show that all variants are effective, with a slight advantage for multiple output methods, which are more robust to parameter choices. [less ▲]

in Journal of Gravitational Physiology : A Journal of the International Society for Gravitational Physiology (2008), 15

In mammals, the Sox4 gene is involved in development of endocardial crests, the brain, the lung, teeth, gonads and lymphocytes. Recently, Sox4 was shown to control bone mass and mineralization in mice. In ... [more ▼]

In mammals, the Sox4 gene is involved in development of endocardial crests, the brain, the lung, teeth, gonads and lymphocytes. Recently, Sox4 was shown to control bone mass and mineralization in mice. In zebrafish, two homologs for the mammalian Sox4 are present, sox4a and sox4b. Here we investigate the function of the sox4a and sox4b genes in cartilage and bone development in zebrafish. Therefore, we focus our attention on the first bone structures to be formed, the head skeleton and more precisely the pharyngeal cartilage. We show that both genes are expressed in the pharyngeal region, albeit at different time points during development. Double in situ hybridization experiments are used to exactly define the particular tissues where they are expressed. Furthermore, microinjection experiments of antisense oligonucleotides are used to block translation of these specific genes and to define their precise function during cartilage and bone development. [less ▲]